Lolita in History

Gardens and Parks," the final chapter of Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951), ends rather abruptly in 1940. Nabokov recounts details of his child's infancy in Hitler's Germany and then reflects: "Now and then, a recognized patch of historical background aids local identification—and substitutes other bonds for those a personal vision suggests. Our child must have been almost three on that breezy day in Berlin (where, of course, no one could escape familiarity with the ubiquitous picture of the Führer) when we stood, he and I, before a bed of pallid pansies, each of their upturned faces showing a dark mustache-like smudge, and had great fun, at my rather silly prompting, commenting on their resemblance to a crowd of bobbing little Hitlers." ¹ Most obvious in this scene is the fact that Nabokov and his son are like everyone else, forcibly familiar with the "ubiquitous" Hitler, so much so that his face is everywhere they look, including the flower beds. But in another way, the two are special, for the inescapable pansy Hitlers also confirm the vulnerability of Nabokov's Jewish son, whose racial identity, according to Nazi law, is determined by his Jewish mother. The family's escape, through Paris to the United States, is imminent. In the previous chapter, Nabokov recalls the relief he feels as he passes the room of his sleeping wife and child, secure in the possession of the visa de sortie, issuing from what he calls "the emetic of a bribe . . . administered to the right rat at the right office," ensuring permission to cross the Atlantic (S, 216). The "Gardens and Parks" scene is typically Nabokovian in its affinity for flora, fauna, and all manner of wild things, and for its ingenious means of transforming them into imaginative artifacts. Nabokov is alive to the natural world in a way that makes his fictional landscapes always distinctive, always wondrous in a sense that is biological, psychological, and literary all at once.

However artfully or wittily reconceived, this natural scene is extraordinary precisely for its recourse to the real. The ubiquitous danger of the Führer is magically reinscribed as an image of natural profusion, a veritable bloom of "bobbing little Hitlers," as Nabokov seeks to make child's play of a familiar, indeed all too familial, vulnerability. Yet the crowd of bobbing Hitlers, which relies on a historical rather than a natural principle of growth, is more botanical nightmare than triumph. For what makes Nabokov's scene a true Eden is the presence of a snake: the Satanic smudge of history. The attitude toward history in the first sentence, where Nabokov adopts a Humbert-like notion of a force that ambles, now and then, seemingly at random and at will, into view is belied by the sentence's end, where history is more like an unexpected guest. A recognized patch, or space in time, caught and made valuable as an aid to the willed record of spoken memory becomes an irrevocable fate. History steps in authoritatively to substitute "other bonds" for those a "personal vision" might more gently suggest. The involuntary bonds imposed by history that Nabokov undoubtedly has in mind here are the blood bonds that imperil the lives of his Jewish wife and son in Hitler's Berlin.

What I will argue over the course of this essay is that two fundamental elements of this passage from Speak, Memory are vividly present in Nabokov's great novel Lolita (1955): the sense of urgency stemming from the imminence of persecution and the salvation of exile, and the sense of history as a force to be confronted through the transformative powers of the imagination. My argument is the product of a realization I had when I first taught this complex and terrifying novel eight years ago: reading Lolita in history, at least for me, is necessary to its deepest appreciation, and consequently, necessary to my bringing it to life for contemporary students. To be sure, reading Lolita...